Vanilla fairy cakes

This is a recipe that brings back very happy memories of baking with my mum & sister and also my food technology course at school. It’s one of the first recipes I ever made and I’m sure fairy cakes were around long before their bigger cupcake cousins were on the scene

Fairy cakes are essential cupcakes in small form. The recipe I’m showing you today is incredibly light, thanks to the combination of self-raising flour and baking powder. If you don’t have self-raising flour available, you can safely use extra baking powder instead.

The addition of vanilla extract in the cake batter gives these little cakes a wonderful sweetness and warmth. You’ll also notice I’ve used margarine rather than butter in this recipe. I find you don’t really miss the butter flavour in these cakes and it also means you can use the ‘all in one’ method, rather than creaming the butter and sugar first. They are topped with a simple water icing, made with water and icing (powdered) sugar). You can top these with whatever you like…sweets, chocolate or in my case, hundreds and thousands! I made the rather silly mistake of sprinkling the fairy cakes with said decoration on the worktop. This resulted in a hundreds and thousands explosion and resulted in the ‘hoovering through a straw’ method of cleaning

These cakes are perfect for a party (children love them) or when you perhaps want the taste of a cupcake without the calories!